Lucia Fairchild Fuller

Lucia Fairchild Fuller (December 6, 1870 – May 21, 1924) who served during President Grover Cleveland's administration as the Secretary of the Treasury Department.

John Singer Sargent, a family friend, She wrote of her recollections of a visit to the Louvre with Sargent.

She was educated at Shaw's Private School and the Cowles Art School in Back Bay, Boston, under Dennis Miller Bunker, a friend of Sargent's. She then continued her studies at the Art Students League of New York, under William Merritt Chase and the muralist, Henry Siddons Mowbray.

Career The Women of Plymouth ca. 1893. Oil on canvas, 132 x 144 in. Exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL, 1893, Woman's Building. Blow-Me-Down Grange, Plainfield, NH. An 1890 self-portrait demonstrates Fairchild's artistic abilities at age 18. She also did a portrait of her brother Blair Fairchild at the piano in 1891. Her chosen subject was female New England settlers, and was titled The Women of Plymouth. It was considered a significant commission.

She was awarded a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900, a silver medal at Buffalo in 1901, and a gold medal at the Saint Louis Exposition of 1904. Five works were at exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915. Fairchild Fuller also exhibited her work in New Hampshire at Dartmouth College in 1916.

In 1899 she was a founding member and treasurer of the American Society of Miniature Painters. She also served as president in 1913. She was an elected member of the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists. She maintained memberships with the National Association of Women Artists and the New York Watercolor Club. The final painting includes the figures of Lucia and Clara in the foreground, barely clad, and Mount Ascutney, with one of the many newly built Cornish Colony homes, in the background.

The couple became estranged in 1901. Fairchild Fuller was portrayed in a 1902 painting, variously titled The Spinet, or Lady and Spinet, or Lady Playing Harpsichord, or Portrait of Lucia, by Cornish Colony founder and painter, Thomas Wilmer Dewing. Dewing executed a nearly identical "partner" painting of her that summer. In 1905, Fairchild Fuller became separated from her husband, who returned to his family home in Deerfield, Massachusetts to live with his mother, Agnes Higginson Fuller. They remained owners of their home in Plainfield, and continued to spend time in the area, often renting the home to other artists, including Ethel Barrymore and the Zorachs.

In 1905, Fairchild Fuller painted a second self-portrait, In the Looking Glass, a 6 x 4 inch watercolor on ivory, wherein she depicted herself as a mature woman with eyeglasses, looking directly at the viewer. The work, owned by Fairchild Fuller's family, was included in the 1987 publication American Women Artists, 1830-1930, by Eleanor Tufts, one of the first publications by the newly opened National Museum of Women in the Arts. Fairchild Fuller moved to New York City, where she taught at the Art Students League in the years 1910-11 and 1914-15. The only school specializing in miniature painting in New York City, The American School of Miniature Painting, operated from 1914 to 1924. Fairchild Fuller taught alongside the artist Elsie D. Pattee and trained the Texan artist Elsie Motz Lowdon. They were the same age, had arrived in Cornish about the same time, and had shared a decade of experience in the Cornish Colony. She died there of multiple sclerosis on May 21, 1924, at the age of 51.

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